I’ve mentioned before that EIGRP SIA was my nightmare case at TAC, but there was one other type of case that I hated–QoS problems. Routing protocol problems tend to be binary. Either the route is there or it...
Read MoreI’ve mentioned in previous TAC Tales that I started on a TAC team dedicated to enterprise, which made sense given my background. Shortly after I came to Cisco the enterprise team was broken up and its staff distributed...
Read MoreEveryone who’s worked in TAC can tell you their nightmare case–the type of case that, when they see it in the queue, makes them want to run away, take an unexpected lunch break, and hope some other engineer grabs...
Read MoreA common approach for TAC engineers and customers working on a tough case is to just “throw hardware at it.” Sometimes this can be laziness: why troubleshoot a complex problem when you can send an RMA, swap out a...
Read MoreWhen I first started at Cisco TAC, I was assigned to a team that handled only enterprise customers. One of the first things my boss said to me when I started there was “At Cisco, if you don’t like your boss or your...
Read MoreNo customer is happy if they have to reboot one of their Internet-facing routers periodically, and this was one of our biggest customers. (At HTTS, they were all big customers.) This customer had a GSR connecting to the...
Read MoreWhen you work at TAC, you are required to be “on-shift” for 4 hours each day. This doesn’t mean that you work four hours a day, just that you are actively taking cases only four hours per day. The other four...
Read MoreWhen I was still a new engineer, a fellow customer support engineer (CSE) asked a favor of me. I’ll call him Andy. “I’m going on PTO, could you cover a case for me? I’ve filed a bug and while I’m...
Read MoreMy job as a customer support engineer (CSE) at TAC was the most quantified I’ve ever had. Every aspect of our job performance was tracked and measured. We live in the era of big data, and while numbers can be helpful,...
Read MoreWhen I first started at TAC, I wasn’t allowed to take cases by myself. If I grabbed a case, I had to get an experienced engineer to help me out. One day I grabbed a case on a Catalyst 6k power supply, and asked Veena...
Read MoreI’ve come back to Cisco recently, and I think I can say that I haven’t worked this hard since the last time I was at Cisco. I remember my first manager at TAC telling me in an interview that “Cisco loves...
Read MoreNew Year’s resolutions are made to be broken, and I haven’t been keeping up with my resolution to do more blog posts. Now that I am back at Cisco, I am focusing on programmability and automation, and I do have a lot...
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